Photography exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts shows the beauty of family

By Jody Feinberg/The Patriot Ledger

Thursday

Jan 25, 2018 at 10:49 AM

BOSTON - Families are the subjects of countless films, plays and books, but not usually of photography exhibits. That makes the Museum of Fine Arts’ “(un)expected families” particularly interesting and thought-provoking.

“It’s foremost a show about photographers’ definition of family, but it’s also about how there’s no single definition of family,” said curator Karen Haas. “It’s about the families people are born into and the ones they choose, which can be equally important.”

With 80 photos spanning 150 years, from the 19th century to today, the exhibit offers a revealing historical perspective and an expansive view of family relationships. On view are intimacy and estrangement, parental, friendship and romantic love, same-sex and multi-generational relationships, families founded on faith communities and military service.

“We form bonds of love and forge connections that endure,” explains the exhibit’s introductory wall label. “Often, those connections may have less to do with DNA and ancestry than with trust, community and shared experience.”

Most of the works are from the MFA’s collection. Among those are eight that were acquired specifically for the exhibition to fill in gaps in its holdings of photographs of LGBTQ relationships. The portraits and unposed images – color and black-and-white – range from documentary to fine art.

There are works by preeminent photographers such as Nan Goldin, Gordon Parks, Nicholas Nixon, Sally Mann, Diane Arbus and Bruce Davidson, as well as less established ones from New England and across the country.

In hanging the photographs, Haas said she intended them to be in conversation with each other. That’s easy to see in three powerful portraits of families in vehicles.

“Each photograph has a story that reflects events in the families’ lives,” Haas said. “One of the things that’s so wonderful about exhibiting photographs is that people feel a connection to them.”

Dorothea Lange photographed the struggle of a Depression-era farm worker family as the father tried to fix his wagon. Mary Ellen Mark captured the closeness and despair of a homeless Los Angeles couple and their two young children who were living out of a Buick Skylark in 1987. And Julie Mack staged a 2009 photo of her, her two brothers and parents in their SUV, the spaceship-like appearance of which is symbolic of their suburban bubble.

On one wall, the exhibit presents 17 photos as though they were hanging in a family home. Depicting closeness, Julie Blackmon’s photo captures the moment when a baby thrown high in the air is on its way into the arms of the man in a field waiting to catch it. That photo, “Baby Toss” contrasts with the sense of disconnection in “Ritz Bar, New York City” by Louis Faurer, in which the mother, father and two young boys stare in different directions as they stand just outside the door waiting for a taxi.

Reflecting the familial bonds between soldiers, two powerful portraits by Louie Palu reveal the toll of war in the close-ups of the dirt-streaked, grim faces of helmeted Marines who fought in Afghanistan. A photo by Gordon Parks shows Ethel Shariff, the eldest daughter of Nation of Islam head Elijah Mohammed, standing in the forefront, flanked by fellow women’s corps members, all wearing the same white head covering and outfit.

Two of the most tender fine-art images are “Self-Portrait with Daniel” by Arno Rafael Minkkinen, in which his young son sits cross-legged on a bed bathed in light, just in front of he photographer’s bare arms, which seem to embrace both the boy and the semicircle headboard behind him. In “My Mother and John in Annie’s Pool,” Virginia Beahan photographed her mother, suffering from dementia, lying on her back with her eyes closed in a swimming pool, held afloat by a man.

“I just love these images,” Haas said. “They show caring and embracing and are quite moving and beautiful.”

Of historical interest are six black-and-white snapshots depicting “Boston marriages” – a turn-of-the-century term for two women who lived together without the support of a man, sometimes romantically and sometimes platonically.

Other historical photos show Victorian-era “hidden mothers.” During the late 1800s, when infant mortality was very high, mothers sought portraits of their infants and toddlers. To keep the children immobile, the mothers held them but hid themselves under draped fabric so that the child alone would be seen in the photo.

One of the new acquisitions, a photo by Amber Tourlentes, appears like a giant window, perhaps as a metaphor for seeing. The 42 panes reveal a different LGBTQ family. Tourlentes photographed the families in Provincetown during the Cape Cod town’s annual Family Week.

Zoe Perry-Wood posed “Jose and Luis,” a high school couple dressed for the Boston Alliance of Gay and Lesbian Youth Prom.

In her digital projection, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew digitized a photograph of an immigrant, faded it out and replaced the original photo with one of someone from the next generation. It’s passage-of-time evocation is both eerie and inspiring, as the five families she featured passed from immigrants to American citizens. Without the original photos, a crucial part of family history would have been lost.”

“Other than $20 and a few clothes, all we had were the photos my father left us – a legacy which is irreplaceable,” said a woman who escaped Vietnam just before the fall of Saigon.